Tuesday, December 17, 2013

How to Convince People That You're Jesus in 5 Easy Steps

A.J. Miller has decided he is Jesus. He has moved with his followers to a rural compound near Kingaroy, Australia, and an estimated 60 people have joined him there. These kinds of arrangements usually end pretty well. How does he pull it off? He follows the 5 easy steps...

So you want people to believe that you're Jesus Christ. Or, if you don't want to be tied down to anything so specific as Jesus, then you at least want people to think you are the physical embodiment of God on earth.

Who wouldn't want this? The list of benefits is as long as my arm.

First off, if you're a man (and generally speaking, it mostly seems to be men who reach for this dream), then you get to have sex with all the women in the congregation.

Which if you think about it, is an incredible privilege for the women. I mean, you're having sex with some gullible, emotionally fractured woman. That woman, on the other hand, is having SEX WITH GOD. Where to even begin? Let's just call that one a Win/Win.

What else? Oh, yes. Everybody has to give you all their money. That's a nice perk. You can use that money to buy yourself stuff, like cars and cocaine and weapons and a big plot of land somewhere to hole up for when the End Times come.

Sound good so far? I don't want to oversell it, but if you ask me, being Jesus or God or even just the reincarnation of the Bodhissatva of Compassion, is a pretty sweet gig.

But how do you go about it? If you just start telling random people you're God, that's not going to fly. Bullshit detectors are going to flash red alerts left and right.

Luckily, there's a well-established template you can use. And there's a man in Australia who's using that template to good effect right now. His name is Alan John Miller, or AJ Miller, or just plain AJ.

AJ preaches what he calls the "Divine Truth," a message which mostly boils down to the idea that he is the reincarnation of Jesus, with a little bit of the Law of Attraction thrown in.

Let's break down what AJ is doing into 5 steps, in case we want to apply these principles in our own lives.

AJ with Mary Suzanne Luck, who He has decided is not herself but is actually the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. Reports suggest that she is about the 10th woman AJ has bestowed the title of Mary Magdalene upon. Why stop when something works?

1. Find lonely, damaged people, or people who are at a low point in their lives, and offer them unconditional acceptance and love.

This is known as the "Love Bomb." There's no end to the damaged people out there, and the internet makes them easier than ever to find. The trick is to get them among your people, and create instant, loving, attentive friends for them. At least at first, this often requires repeatedly contacting, visiting and pressuring your target to come to group events.

Labor intensive, but it works. AJ's followers often say that they were outcasts before they joined, but found total acceptance from AJ and the group.

The key to remember here is that you don't have to convince everyone that you're God - far from it. For this to work, you only have to convince a relatively tiny group of people, and you can pick them out one by one.

2. Make liberal use of fear and intimidation, as well as Character Assassination and "Breaking Sessions."

Once you've got someone believing in you, the task is to break down any remaining resistance they might have, and achieve total domination. Breaking Sessions are long meetings where targeted people are criticized and insulted, and encouraged to dwell on their failures and weaknesses. The ideal outcome of this is to leave the target in an abject state, crying uncontrollably.

If the target dares question you or your ideas, you subject them to blistering attacks on their intelligence, their looks, their abilities, whatever you've got on them. If they try to use logic, you answer them with nonsense. Obviously, you plan this abuse ahead of time, and you encourage other group members to pile on.

By all accounts, AJ makes frequent use of Breaking Sessions, with some sessions reaching such an extreme that neighbors of his compound call the police because of all the shrieking and caterwauling.

3. Preach a simple message, which is the One True Message, that you hammer endlessly.

Pretty self explanatory, right? It's the old Keep It Simple, Stupid approach. In AJ's case, the message is the Divine Truth that he is Jesus reincarnated.

He combines this with elements of the Law of Attraction, which might be where he stumbles just a touch. The Law of Attraction is the very old idea, popularized in recent years by "The Secret" books and movie, that whatever you think about, good or bad, will magically come to pass. Cosmic, sure, but why add unnecessary elements?

In any case, AJ is on the record as saying that Divine Truth is "God's truth," and the "absolute truth of the universe."

4. Give people a new identity as members of your group, and create an Us vs. Them mentality.

AJ has a rewards system called "spheres." The more you understand about his teachings, and the better you follow them, the higher the sphere you attain. AJ's followers tend to identify closely with the sphere they've reached.

AJ also encourages his followers to regard outsiders with suspicion and contempt. Obviously, people outside the group are inferior, since they haven't accepted the Divine Truth that AJ is Jesus.

AJ also employs a nifty concept called the "soul partner." Numerous people have left their spouses and families after AJ helped them wake up to the fact that the person they married was not their soul partner.

5. Isolate your followers from the outside world and from competing messages.

Most would-be Messiahs do this by establishing a private compound where followers live. Once you've got followers living on the compound, you can control who they see, what information they have access to, when they get up, when they sleep, what they do - pretty much all aspects of their lives.

You can cement this control by inventing a DoomsDay scenario in which most people on earth will be killed, but people on the compound will be saved.

AJ hits all these notes. His compound is about 600 acres in a rural area outside Kingaroy, Queensland, Australia. The compound was purchased for him by his followers, and currently houses 60 or more people. AJ preaches that a coming world catastrophe will wipe out the major coastal cities of Australia, and turn his compound into a tropical paradise.

There you have it. You're armed with the 5 steps, and you have AJ's stellar example to draw from. If you're diligent and you apply yourself, within a couple of years, you should have disciples flocking to you in droves.